22 May 2005
New details about Soviet Cold War intentions

There's a very interesting tidbit in this article, one with almost universal applicability:

Penetration of the western military was unusually high, and they had a lot of very specific intelligence about NATO's thinking. That should have told them that NATO's planning was defensive, but their ideology predisposed them to assume that capitalist states were aggressive and that NATO was on the verge of a strike at any moment. Their ideology, in part, explains why they ignored the findings of their own intelligence establishment.

Would the Soviet Union have survived longer if it had heeded the wisdom of it's own spies? Would they have diverted spending from military to civilian purposes and staved off the collapse? Who knows? But Bush & Co. would do well to heed these words - allowing your politics to color the facts is the path of fools.

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Warsaw Pact. Newly declassified papers from former Communist states shed fresh light on the inner workings of the Soviet Union's Cold War alliance with its eastern European satellites and its plans for war. U.S. News spoke with Malcolm Byrne, coauthor of A Cardboard Castle? An Inside History of the Warsaw Pact 1955-1991, about the finds.

(link) [U.S. News & World Report]

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